How to Hire an SEO
SEO experts can significantly increase your revenue but they can also completely tank your business. Even get it removed from Google. That’s why it’s really important to make the right choice when we’re hiring an SEO expert. Let’s talk about four main ideas that we need to focus on to make sure that we find the right person.
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Learn Some SEO Yourself
The first idea is we need to make sure that we understand SEO ourselves. If we’re hiring an SEO we better know what we’re looking for. Not only is this going to make the hiring process. A lot smoother but it’s also going to make the SEO feel a lot more understood in the company.
I’m talking from personal experience when I say that it’s really frustrating to work with people that don’t understand what’s happening. Also have unrealistic expectations of your work. I’ve worked with people that expected to rank number one for a very competitive keyword in under a month.
That’s completely unrealistic so it makes everything easier when the people that are hiring are actually knowledgeable about what they’re looking for? They understand that SEO is a process that takes time.
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What is Experience of SEO Experts
The second idea that we’re going to take a look at is their experience. We want to break down all the different projects that they’ve worked on. We want to know exactly how involved they’ve been and what the results of that work. We obviously want to make sure that their cv and their profile looks great online. But what we want to do is take a deep dive into all those different experiences.
See exactly what they’ve done and we want to make sure. They can take us from point “A” to point “B” right! So from the strategy and the idea to what was actually implemented and to the final results that came out of all of that work. Another thing that we can see here is their specialty within SEO just like developers or designers.
SEO’s often specialize in one specific area of SEO maybe it’s an SEO that’s very technical. They focus more on technical SEO or maybe you’re looking at a link building master You’ll know what you want based on the necessities of your company at the time. But if you’re looking for an all-around great SEO that dominates all the different areas inside of SEO. We want to see how they’ve been involved in all those different areas and how they’ve tied it all together to get results.
The next thing that’s really relevant here is the type of SEO projects that they’ve been involved. So was the last project that they worked on A website. Because the SEO that you do on a A website is going to be very different to the SEO. You do on an e-commerce website. For example, it’s also very common for a lot of SEO’s to only have experience with affiliate SEO.
The main thing here is we want to know if they have experience working on projects that are similar to yours a final thing. I’d like to add when I’m looking at someone’s experience is I like to ask about personal projects. So have they built anything on their own online and have they tried to rank it. Obviously isn’t mandatory but it’s going to show if they have that additional level of passion for SEO and that’s going to be a great sign.
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We Are Going to Test Them
The next thing we’re going to do is to test them. We’re going to put all those skills that they say on their cv. We’re going to ask for an SEO audit and we’re going to give them a few days to do it. We’re also going to ask that they give us some suggestions and some recommendations on the most high impact things that we can do for my project.
To improve the organic traffic of our website so this is great for a variety of reasons. Not only is it going to test their SEO skills but we’re going to see how they work under pressure. If they can deliver good SEOs will honestly be able to see things very quickly. They might not need more than a couple of days to get a complete SEO audit done. It’s also going to test how well they understand your business goals given that they’re going to need to create a plan.
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A strategy around their audit so you’ll see right away! If there’s someone that understands and cares about your business. If they tell you to fix a really critical SEO problem. First instead of something like improving image and alt tags this. Why it’s important to have at least some basic knowledge of SEO to understand the different things?
They come back to us with and we also want to find someone who’s thinking long term. SEO itself is something that takes a long time so we want to find someone that can find those quick fixes. But is also thinking about that long-term strategy and how you can take over your niche.
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Personal Traits
The fourth idea is personal traits so hiring an SEO is just like hiring anybody else at a company. We want to make sure that we see ourselves having a proactive work relationship with that person. One of the main personal traits that I look for in a good SEO is great communication skills. Not only is this great to make sure that all parties involved understand all the SEO changes that are being made. But it’s really important for that SEO to defend themselves against developers and designers that want to make changes to that website.
That could potentially kill your organic traffic so that’s why having interviews and having multiple calls with that person is very important to see the type of person they are and see all the different traits that they’re bringing to your company.
Word of Advice
Also guys just as a word of advice if you are potentially looking or hiring a big SEO agency be very careful. There’s a lot of really big SEO agencies that try and get as many clients as possible but don’t end up. Actually they doing a lot of work for those clients so make sure you do some proper due diligence to find out exactly what they’re going to do to your website. Also make sure you have a timeline and that you check in on that agency at least once a month to find out about all the different changes that they’re making.